Any football fan (or, if you happen to be stateside, any soccer fan) worth their mettle can tell you the exact moment they became a fan. No hesitation, no second guessing. They. Just. Know.
One fan’ll say they’re following Tottenham because their son did.
Another fan’ll be rooting for AC Milan because they had studied abroad in Italy.
And someone else might support Fulham because, well, for a while, it had a run of American players.
Whatever the reason, a club (club being another word for team, though football/soccer fans would probably say it means a bit more than that) has a way of becoming a part of you. You’re hooked. Locked in. Converted, you might even say.
“That’s what I love about the sport,” says Matt Lehman, a self proclaimed longtime convert himself and CEO of FootballNews365, an app business he purchased in 2023, and the developer behind a whole assortment of apps that gives soccer fans everything they’d ever need about their club: news, stats, standings, signings (or rumors thereof), even match updates.
The flagship app itself was originally built back in 2018. These two friends got together near Liverpool in the UK, one a marketer, the other an engineer, both football fans themselves, believing that other football fans out there would also appreciate an app just for them, just for their respective clubs.
And, it turns out, they all made the right call.
“I want an app to represent the passion I have for that club,” Matt says, explaining why he had been so drawn to the business in the first place.
Before Matt took over, he had kept himself busy with a career in product marketing, focused mostly in financial services.
Still, he wasn’t a developer by any means, though he likes to joke that “dabbling” in technology gets more tempting everyday now, especially as AI holds the potential to help him build something without having to go through any formal training.
What he did bring to the table, however, was a product mindset toward the fan experience, something he himself was intimately familiar with. “I grew up with that same passion,” Matt says. “That love for a club.”
Plus, from his point of view, the U.S. was just getting started with its own soccer culture. The signs were everywhere: more jerseys on the streets, more fans following European clubs, the U.S. hosting the World Cup in 2026, the list goes on.
“You walk around any major metro city and you see more soccer jerseys than you see American football jerseys or baseball jerseys nowadays," says Matt.
He was also there at some of the sport’s biggest U.S. milestones. Take, for instance, the men’s World Cup in 1994, hosted in the United States — Matt was there. Then, in 1999, at the Rose Bowl when the US women’s national team won the World Cup — Matt was also there.
“I think I recognized that was a seminal moment for soccer in the U.S. as a whole,” he says, talking about the Rose Bowl. “From that point on, it’s been a true passion of mine.”
And it’s Matt’s passion that’s now on full display at FootballNews365. Since Matt came aboard, the business has grown its portfolio beyond the FN365 app into more club-specific apps like Rangers News 365 and a Manchester United app. They’ve also launched FN365W, which focuses on the women’s game, along with an app covering the National Premier Soccer League, a US minor league. They’ve also recently added a new website, SoccerNearMe that helps fans in the US and Canada find local games nearby from MLS, NWSL, and all of the minor leagues, and have started a dedicated site called Lower90 just to cover the wonderful world of minor league soccer in the U.S.
